Lakȟótiyapi AAC was founded by a Lakota mom on a mission to teach her child Lakota, even though he is primarily an AAC user in English. There’s no reason our children can’t do this, just like every other child out there.
Our primary focus is on providing a Lakota language vocabulary and synthetic voice to AAC users who wish to speak Lakota.
We plan to translate this into Dakota and Nakoda. We also plan to make our methods available for other Indigenous groups to work on developing their own vocabularies.
Having the experience of learning to use multiple devices and helping our child learn to use devices in 2 languages, we also want to provide training and support to families, training and support to special ed teachers of Indigenous children, training on AAC to Indigenous language teachers, classroom materials for all programs that include language and AAC users, and cultural competence training for speech therapists.
We plan to do this via grant funding, producing products under a creative commons license. We plan to work with several universities to offer CEUs for teachers and SLPs, who are expected to pay for their continuing education hours.